Custom documents are documents that are personalized or tailored in some way to the particular user of the document. Two growing applications of custom documents are in the domain of variable data printing, as well as in web personalization.
In traditional variable data applications the creation of a custom document is accomplished by an expert in graphic arts, databases, layout, document design, etc. This expert document creator develops an overall layout for the document that includes slots for the variable data. The creator also finds or creates appropriate content pieces, and specifies rules for how to fill in the variable slots with this content, or places the content in a database and then links the slots to particular fields in the database. The variable data application then creates a document for each customer by inserting the data for the customer into its linked slot. These types of templates are typically called “lick and stick”, because the template has “art holes” which are defined by the document creator, and then the variable data is placed into those art holes to form different instances of the document. The resulting set of documents is typically quite similar: each variable slot has one piece of content of about the same size and the general layout is the same for all instances, regardless of the available content pieces. Thus, the traditional ‘variable data template’ not only requires extensive time and expertise from the document creator, but it also does not respond dynamically to varying amounts or types of content pieces, or to restrictions imposed by the variable content.
In the domain of web documents and web personalization, the focus is often not on a dynamic document layout per se but rather on dynamic data. The assumption is that the document template is pre-determined and the challenge is to find the right data at the right time. For instance, dynamic web documents are typically formed by embedding “scripts” (i.e., programs) into the HTML page. These scripts are then interpreted by the web server. This enables certain elements of the document (e.g., a weather reading) to be inserted or created at the time of document display. This approach can only produce documents according to the underlying program. In order to achieve different results, the program must be changed and thus this approach is not truly dynamic. In web personalization applications, much of the focus is on user profiling and understanding what e-commerce customers are doing online so that you can provide the appropriate information. Again, the focus is on finding the appropriate information, not on laying it out differently based on what is found. The techniques used to create dynamic web pages often involve writing specific scripts or programs that can be embedded in web pages and interpreted by the web server. This approach lacks in generality, introduces restrictive platform dependencies, and can be extremely difficult and expensive to maintain.
Traditional creation of custom documents such as variable data documents requires expertise in many areas such as graphic arts and databases and is a time consuming process. With the ever-increasing amount of information in the digital world and the amount of un-trained users producing documents, old publishing tools often prove cumbersome and demanding whereas present dynamic digital environments demand tools that can reproduce both the contents and the layout automatically tailored to personal needs and which can enable novices to easily create such documents.
In the realm of custom document creation, what is needed in the arts is a way to automatically select document content and lay it out into a final document, without relying on expert graphic artists, or using specialized scripts that are embedded in an HTML file.
Known methods for automated creation of documents have focused more on particular types of documents, and not on modeling the problem in a general way in order to address all types of documents. Existing work provides methods for creating diagrams (see Dengler, E. Friedell, M., Marks, J., Constraint-Driven Diagram Layout, Proceedings of the 1993 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, pages 330–335, Bergen, Norway, 1993), or multimedia presentations (see Rousseau, F., Garcia-Macias, A., Valdeni de Lima, J., and Duda, A., User Adaptable Multimedia Presentations for the WWW, Electronic Proceedings from the 8th International World Wide Web Conference, 1999), or flowcharts and yellow pages (see Graf, W. H., The Constraint-Based Layout Framework LayLab and Applications, Electronic Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Effective Abstractions in Multimedia, 1995). Others have explored automating the process of web document layout (see Kroener, A., The Design Composer: Context-Based Automated Layout for the Internet, Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium Series: Using Layout for the Generation, Understanding, or Retrieval of Documents, 1999). None of the existing automated approaches provide a formalized, constraint-satisfaction formulation of the document creation process, nor do they include the selection of content in their automated process. Furthermore, existing automated approaches concentrate solely on a single type of document.
What is needed in the arts is a way to eliminate some of the traditional limitations of custom document creation by providing a methodology that supports a flexible and efficient assembly of document components resulting in truly dynamic and personalized documents.